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Friday, 26 January 2018

As of January 2018, Head Of Zeus will be releasing my books in the US. To celebrate, the Steel City series has undergone something of a reinvention - updated covers, new blurbs etc. Most importantly, Blood Guilt will now be sold as a standalone - which in truth it always has been. Whilst Angel of Death, Justice for the Damned and Spider's Web will be sold as a trilogy under the new series title of The Missing Ones. Again, this makes sense as the three books tell one big story. Head Of Zeus are also releasing a trilogy box set at a bargain price - currently about half the price of purchasing each book separately. So do yourself a favour and grab all three at once. You won't regret it (I hope).

1993. A trip to the cinema turns into a nightmare for Anna Young and her little sister Jessica, when two men throw thirteen-year-old Jessica into the back of a van and speed away.

1997. Fifteen-year-old Grace Kirby kisses her mum goodbye and heads off to school. It’s a day like any other, except that Grace will never return home.

2012.Melinda (surname and age unknown) has been missing for weeks. The police would normally be all over it, but Melinda is a prostitute. Women in that line of work are the perfect victims. Most are runaways and drug addicts, leading transient existences. She probably just moved on.

Jessica, Grace and Melinda are not the only ones who have gone missing. There are others. Lots of them. On the surface, their disappearances don’t appear to be connected. But one man is convinced otherwise.

When DI Jim Monahan is called to a fatal shooting, he comes to realise the case is only part of a bigger picture – one that he becomes hell-bent on exposing to the world. But a shadowy ring of powerful people will do anything to prevent that from happening. Over the course of three books, Jim’s investigation leads him down a rabbit hole of murder, depravity and corruption that will test his faith in the law to breaking-point.

From the bestselling author of Blood Guilt and The Lost Ones, comes a hard-hitting trilogy that will have you questioning how far you would go to see justice done.

Tuesday, 25 October 2016

A new novel, a new publisher... At long last it's release day for my psychological thriller 'The Lost Ones'. I hugely enjoyed writing the Steel City Thrillers, but after four years I decided it was time for a change of scenery. The result was 'The Lost Ones', a standalone story of murder, deceit and desire set in beautiful, bleak Northumberland. The novel was picked up by Thomas & Mercer who did an incredible job of fully realising my vision for it. I hope you enjoy plunging into its mystery as much as I did creating it.

Some secrets are better left undiscovered.

When a nine-year-old girl goes missing in Harwood Forest, the search for her brings back memories of an unsolved double murder some forty years earlier. Could the key to Erin Jackson’s disappearance lie in the bloody fate of Elijah and Joanna Ingham, bludgeoned to death while their young daughters slept? Were the Inghams really the victims of opportunistic burglars—or a more sinister fate?

The woods are combed for signs of the child, but Erin’s brother, Jake, mounts his own investigation, uncovering evidence that puts the Inghams’ daughters—vanished Rachel and ‘crazy’ Mary—in the frame. Meanwhile, Erin’s father suspects that the ragtag army of eco-warriors besieging his quarry development may have something to hide.

As devastating secrets and betrayals are revealed, the Jackson family is brought to a breaking point. But time is running out. Erin is still missing and Jake’s unorthodox enquiries have left him dangerously exposed. They must find Erin and lay the past to rest—before they become its latest victims....

Monday, 27 July 2015

A mere four months after the release of Justice For The Damned, it's the turn of Spider's Web to make its way out into the virtual world (the hardback follows on November 5th). Two books in a year! Phew. For all you readers who devour books in a matter of days, I'm afraid to say this is the end result of more than two years' work as opposed to me being a fast writer. So I hope you enjoy what is most definitely a rare treat. The fourth Steel City Thriller picks up the story roughly a year after the events of the third book with Jim Monahan back on the case. This is the final part of a three-book story arc, so please make sure you read Angel Of Death and Justice For the Damned before getting yourself tangled up in Spider's Web.

It is all connected.

February 14th 1993. Sheffield United supporters remember it as the day their team won a famous victory against Manchester United. The date is lodged in Anna Young's brain for a different reason. That was the day her thirteen-year-old sister, Jessica, was abducted...

Fast forward twenty years. The case has long since gone cold. But Anna won't let it die. She made a promise to look after her little sister. And it's a promise she intends to keep no matter how long it takes...

A detective with one thing on his mind. Jim Monahan is equally determined to bring down a sadistic sex-ring. But everywhere he turns he finds himself entangled in a web of political power and silence. Then comes a bizarre twenty-year-old clue that might just blow the whole thing apart......

Sunday, 1 March 2015

Another year, another Steel City Thriller hits the shelves - well, the 'virtual' shelves at least. The paperback of Justice For The Damned follows on 7 May 2015. The third book in the series picks up from directly where Angel Of Death left off. So if you haven't read Angel Of Death it would be a good idea to do so before plunging into the world of murder, corruption and perversion occupied by the heroes and villains of Justice For the Damned. And if you have read it and wondered whether the Chief Bastard got his comeuppance, you're about to find out...

Thirty years of fear. Thirty years of closed minds. It is all about to change.

A Sheffield prostitute has disappeared. With no family to fight for her, she's just the latest in a long line of missing girls stretching back three decades. Nobody cares about their names. Nobody remembers their faces. They are the unloved, the damaged, the forgotten, the damned...

Amongst the women working South Yorkshire's streets, rumours of a serial killer have long circulated. But the police's top brass don't want to know about it. Talk of serial killers panics the public and embarrasses the department...

But two very different detectives, each driven by their own dangerous obsessions, are being drawn into a murky world of perversion, murder and corruption that stretches from the streets to the corridors of power....

Thursday, 26 February 2015

Bleakness and beauty. Two elements vital to crime fiction. Sheffield does bleakness well. Walk a few miles in the footsteps of Angel, the former prostitute whose rage drives the plot of Angel Of Death, and you’ll see what I mean. Enter the city from the north east, as she does, and you pass through the industrial sprawl of Attercliffe. Much of the steel industry the city is famous for is gone, a victim of Thatcherite policies that dumped an entire generation on the dole scrapheap. What remains, though, has a kind of faded grandeur. The soot-blackened hulks of factories strung out like a dirty necklace along the River Don and the Tinsley Canal still thrum with defiant purpose. Crucibles of heat and sweat. Hard places for hard men, overlooked by narrow streets of terraced houses and the wider, drabber spaces of council estates.

As you near the city centre, the concrete rampart of Park Hill looms into view. A thousand flats stacked around and on top of each other like cardboard boxes. A monument to the brutality of fifties and sixties architecture and the failed idealism of creating streets in the sky. The estate was seen as revolutionary at the time it was built. But by the ’80s the dream had descended into a nightmare of social isolation, drugs and muggings, earning the estate the blackly humorous nickname from some locals of ‘San-Quentin’. Not so long ago there was talk of it being demolished. But many saw beauty in its ugliness, fighting to save and restore it.

From Park Hill the city spreads out before you like spokes of a wheel, sometimes bathed in sun, most usually shadowed by leaden clouds. A single glance can take in the glass roof of the Peace Gardens, the spire of the cathedral, the waters of the Don, the green splashes of parks, the red of Bramall Lane, the blue of Hillsborough. And beyond it all, like an encircling, protecting hand, the hills of the Peak District, a great place to take a romantic walk with your loved one...or to murder them and bury their body without being seen. Stubborn, uncompromising industry that refuses to lie down and die; brooding, weathered tower blocks that endure and are reborn; lonely moors and melancholy crags – it’s a landscape that holds a mirror up to the flawed heroes of my novels. A setting whose bleakness and beauty (much in the way Oslo does for Jo Nesbo or Stockholm for Stieg Larsson) provide the perfect raw materials for a writer seeking to explore the darker side of human nature. By happy coincidence – although the Sheffield tourist board might not agree – it’s also the place I call home.

Thursday, 8 May 2014

It’s been roughly five months since Head of Zeus published Blood Guilt. As wonderful as it is to see my debut novel reborn and on the shelves of WHSmith and Waterstones, this is the moment I’ve really been waiting for. Angel Of Death is the second book in the Steel City Thriller series. It’s a standalone novel, but also the beginning of a three-book story-arc. This time around the action centres on Harlan Miller’s ex-colleague, Jim Monahan – a world-weary detective torn between his duty to the law and his sympathy for the vengeful quest of a woman who’s been abused, raped and used throughout most of her life.

Releasing a new novel into the world is always a tense, exciting moment. I only hope you enjoy reading Angel Of Death as much as I did writing it. So anyway, here we go...

Would you break the law to see justice done?

In the quiet outskirts of Sheffield, the blackened bodies of a man and his wife are retrieved from a house fire. Their daughter and son are found, barely alive, outside their burning house. In the charred remains, the police find evidence of a sickening crime.

In Middlesbrough, a woman smears makeup over the worst of her bruises. The man who made them lies on the bed beside her, but he will never hurt anyone again. Now she has only one thing on her mind: revenge.

D.I. Jim Monahan believes he has found a lead in the case of a teenage girl who went missing years ago. And although the courts might not agree, Jim thinks this is all he needs to bring down a gang of vicious criminals...

Monday, 3 February 2014

Blood Guilt received this great little review from Marcel Berlins in The Times on Saturday:

'Sheffield cop Harlan Miller, the hero of Blood Guilt, goes to pieces when his son dies in a freak accident. He blames his wife, the marriage disintegrates, he takes to drink, gets into a pub fight and accidentally kills a man, for which he spends four years in prison. So far, so normal. But, on his release, he learns that the eight-year-old son of his victim has been kidnapped and is still missing. Out of a misplaced sense of responsibility, Miller launches an unofficial investigation to find the boy. Fast-moving action and lots of twists make this debut novel a most enjoyable read.'

About Me

I like writing. I write a lot. My novels are published by Head of Zeus and Thomas & Mercer. My short stories have won awards and been widely published in the UK, US and Australia. Feel free to contact me with your thoughts about my blog, books, or whatever. I'd love to hear from you!